The present disclosure relates generally to tracing a connection path in a communication network.
Connection tracing is used in a network to identify problem areas and provide detailed information about the network. A connection trace may be used to determine why connections to a given server might be poor, and can often identify the location of problems in cases of instability or other malfunction. TraceRoute is an example of a tool that is used to trace the route of a packet over each hop from a client to a remote host by reporting all router addresses therebetween.
Typically, route tracing programs such as TraceRoute utilize Internet Protocol (IP) packets. In a first IP packet, a Time to Live (TTL) field is set to 1. Whenever an IP packet reaches a router, the TTL field is decremented by the router. When a router detects that the TTL value has reached 0, it sends an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) time exceeded or timeout message back to the source node. By sequentially increasing the TTL field and monitoring the returning ICMP timeout messages, a source node can discover an IP route.
Due to widespread use of firewalls on computer networks, many of the packets that conventional route tracing utilities send out end up being filtered, making it impossible to completely trace the path to the destination. Even if ICMP is allowed at the firewalls, TraceRoute does not follow and report on transparent redirections. Thus, when transparent proxies are in place it is difficult to determine the entities located in the client to server connection path.
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